Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, The post of honour is a private station.

-Addison,Joseph
  Cato, act 4, sc.1, l.319^21.

Prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.

-Bacon, Francis,Viscount St Albans
  Essays, no.5,'Of  Adversity'.

Mutual forgiveness of each vice, Such are the Gates of Paradise.

-Blake,William
  The Gates of Paradise, prologue.

Grit riches and prosperitie Upfosteris vyce.

-Brown,Thomas
c  Letters of Gold, l.131^2.

The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise isgone! it isgone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

-Burke, Edmund
  Reflections on the Revolution in France.

   Then let Ausonia, skilled in every art To soften manners, but corrupt the heart, Pour her exotic follies o'er the town, To sanctionVice, and hunt Decorum down.

-Rochdale
  Engish Bards and Scotch Reviewers, l.618^21.

   Excellentioris person× semper casus in vitium, minoris lapsum, comparatione scandali multe longius antecedit. The scandal of an exalted person's fall into vice, when compared to the lapse of one lesser, always far exceeds it.

-Canmore, Malcolm   d.1093
c.1057  Quoted in  John Fordun's Chronicle of Scotland (c.1384), bk.5, ch.4.

Vice came in always at the door of necessity, not at the door of inclination.

-Defoe, Daniel
  Moll Flanders.

Virtue's his path; but sometimes 'tis too narrow For his vast soul; and then he starts out wide, And bounds into a vice.

-Dryden,John
  Of  Antony.  All for Love, or The World Well Lost, act1.

   Alas, it doesindeed seema monstrousthing, but afterall, what is chaste in Constantinople may have the aspect of lewdness in Liverpool, and what in Liverpool may pass for virtueinConstantinopleisfrequently regardedasvice.

-Ford, Ford Madox originally Ford Hermann Hueffer
  Letter to  John Lane,17 Dec.

Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

-Goldwater, Barry M(orris)
  Speech to the Republican convention,16  Jul.

Mr Kemblesacrificestoomuchto decorum.He ischiefly afraid of being contaminated by too close an identity with the character herepresents.This isthegreatest vice in an actor, who ought never to bilk his part.

-Hazlitt,William
  Of  John Philip Kemble's performance as Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger's  A New Way to Pay Old Debts. In The Examiner, 5 May.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.

-Hemingway, Ernest Millar
  Interview in the Paris Review, Spring.

But if he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses, let us count our spoons.

-Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson
  Remark,14  Jul. Quoted in  James Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), vol.1.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

-Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson
  Of music. Quoted in Sir John Hawkins Johnsoniana (1787).

I see compassion may become a justice, though it be a weakness, I confess, and nearer a vice than a virtue.

-Jonson, Ben
  Bartholomew Fair, act 4, sc.2.

L'hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend a'   la vertu. Hypocrisy is a tribute which vice pays to virtue.

-La Rochefoucauld, Fran c° ois, 6th Duc de
  Maximes, no.218.

My Darling, prickly hedgehog of the heart, chocolates, cherries, hairshirts, pinks and glassö when we joined in the sublime blindness of courtship loving lost all its vice with half its virtue.

-Lowell, RobertTraill Spence,Jr
  'NewYear's Eve'.

All the immediate checks to populationöseem to be resolvable into moral restraint, vice and misery.

-Malthus,Thomas Robert
  An Essay on the Principle of Population.

The root of Evil, Avarice That damn'd ill-natur'd, baneful Vice, Was Slave to Prodigality, That noble Sin; whilst Luxury Employed a Million of the Poor, And odious Pride a Million more; Envy itself, and Vanity, Were Ministers of Industry; Their darling Folly, Fickleness, In Diet, Furniture and Dress That strange ridic'lous Vice, was made That very Wheel that turned theTrade.

-Mandeville, Bernard
  The Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (2nd edn.).